The famous picture below has a small prank in it. Identify the dudes in the picture, and the easter egg it contains.

(Some visual acuity required :-) )

Cracked by: devadutta, BiGFooT (Yeti returns!) , nihit , Poornima , jayanth , Gammafunction , udupendra , Dhruva , alephnull, yaksha and piezocake.

BiGFooT, nihit, Poornima, jayanth, Gammafunction, udupendra, Dhruva, alephnull, yaksha and piezocake

Who are these insects named after?

1. 2.

Cracked by: srikanth , Atul Mathew , Gammafunction , Vinod , prasanth , udupendra , yaksha and BiGFooT.

As if software bugs were not enough,

1. Eristalis Gatesi - Bill Gates
2. Eristalis Alleni - Paul Allen

have flower flies (bugs) named after them :)

Atul Mathew, Gammafunction, Vinod, prasanth, udupendra, yaksha and BiGFooT

Identify the object in the picture:

Cracked by: devadutta, udupendra , Gammafunction , nihit and prasanth.

udupendra, Gammafunction, nihit and prasanth

Who is she?

Take a close look at what she is drawing

Cracked by: udupendra , Biki , srikanth , Gammafunction , yaksha and nihit.

She is Lorrie LeJeune. She draws all those freaky but awesome looking animal illustrations on the O’Reilly books.
More info here http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/news/lejeune_0400.html

udupendra, Biki, srikanth, Gammafunction, yaksha and nihit

A very simple one, considering the context. Identify the logo below, and its significance:

Answered by: alephnull, prasanth and Tathagata Chatterjee.

alephnull, prasanth and Tathagata Chatterjee

1,2 and 3 have a common mega geek title.
What is the title? Identify 1,2 and 3 for full points :)

1. 2. 3.

srikanth , udupendra , jayanth , bs , Piyush , Gammafunction , Prasad , alephnull , SidSen , prasanth and yaksha get full points.

“Benevolent Dictator for Life” is the title. Nice title, isn’t it :)

What this means is they have the final word on anything concerned to the projects they control.

1. Guido von Russom for Python
2. Larry Wall for Perl
3. Patrick Volkerding for Slackware

Others with a similar tile include Linus Torvalds for the Linux Kernel.

srikanth, udupendra, jayanth, bs, Piyush, Gammafunction, Prasad, alephnull, sidsen, prasanth and yaksha

This service started off in 1991, displaying something along these lines:

The original service eventually ended in 2001: this was its last transmission:

The object you see in the first image was sold for £3,350, and the service now shows this:

What “service”?

Answered by: Shashank , bs , Poornima , Piyush , Sharath , Abhishek , uma , Gammafunction , udupendra , Prasad , Dhruva , LordJim and jayanth.

Answer: The Trojan Room Coffee Pot. The pot was sold for a huge amount to Der Speigel, which broadcasts the second type of image.

Shashank, bs, Poornima, Piyush, Sharath, Abhishek, uma, Gammafunction, udupendra, Prasad, Dhruva, LordJim and jayanth

If you have been to any high-school science fair, it is almost impossible that you have not seen 1.
What is 1 popularly known as?

Hint: A time exposure shot of the above thing in action looks like this

Answered by: Srikanth ( back in full form ;) ) and yaksha

1 is called the Jacob’s ladder.

If you see the time exposure shot in 2, you can easily guess why it is called so. If you have not seen a Jacob’s Ladder and wish to see one and want to win bonus points offered by srikanth, head right away(with a camera) to Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum (VITM) in Bangalore(One of the most incredible technological museums on this planet :) )

yaksha and jayanth

Actually, no. No encoding. We stop a step before that :)
If you look at the right-side bar of this page, below the “Hall Of Fame” section, you can see a new “Runlengths” section.

This new section features 5 hard-working boiledbeans users on the front page, who have the longest chain of right answers.

Let us see Shashank’s stats to understand the feature better

Shashank

3 => 4 => 5 => 6 => 7 => 8 => 9 => 10 => 11 => 12
14
22 => 23 => 24 => 25
27
30
32
34
37 => 38 => 39 => 40
43
46
Shashank’s max runlength = 10

The numbers we see here are chains of question numbers where “Shashank” has got the answer right. The longest chain of right answers has a length of 10. Notice that he has other chains which have lengths equal to 4 and 1.

So, now you know how simple it is to reach the front page of boiledbeans.. just get more right answers in a row than the user with 5th longest right answer chain! Simple :)

Also, please stick to the user names which you prefer to use.

A plaintext question today.

Connect these numbers:
212 //// 796 //// 0735
///415///704///0402///
///678///248///2352///

and the TV series LOST.

This question is officially closed. Answers will be announced when Srikanth comes back from his Amazonian expedition.

Answered “perfectly” by Tathagata Chatterjee. Atul Mathew came really really close.

Tathagata Chatterjee and Atul Mathew